OBSERVATIONS ON GIRL CRUSHES by Kate Monro from THE GIRL CRUSH ISSUE

It struck me as I questioned friends for this examination of female admiration that the fastest way to describe how I feel about girl crushes is to describe something that surprised me in my twenties: the boy crush. 

I had a fine boyfriend in my twenties. It sounds like a cliché but he looked like the love child that Robert Redford would produce with Brad Pitt if men could procreate. Visually speaking, I was punching above my weight and whilst I expected women of all ages to go nuts over him (*Sidebar: my much more territorial cousin asking what I was going to do about the woman standing staring at my fanny-magnet DJ boyfriend whilst he nervously tried to cue a record and pretend she wasn’t there….’I don’t know. Make a citizen’s arrest for leering? What am I supposed to do?’)….the adoring men were a surprise.

Because it wasn’t a gay thing. It was breathless starry-eyed straight-boy admiration. Undoubtedly it was also because he was catnip to women and what man wouldn’t want to possess that super power. But there was more to it than that. Simon had a lightness of touch with people. He was 6ft 3 of bloke but he was like a cat. He was a lover not a fighter. His feminine side shone brightly whilst remaining wholly male. He moved through the world in a rarefied light. 

On the off chance he reads this, he will be annoyed at me for making out like he lives the life of riley. Because he is mortal in the end with mortal problems but try telling that to the men who used to dizzily enquire after my boyfriend’s wellbeing. One time I was on another continent and bumped into a male friend I hadn’t seen in years. The first feverish sentence out of his mouth?  ‘How is Simon?’

Another sidebar: It never occurred to me to call this admiration out.  It would have been breaking the fourth wall to do so. If I had named it to any of the men who got saucer eyes over Simon, they would have looked at me like I was losing my mind and accused me of accusing them of being gay (more on that later).

But I saw the love and it says everything about the way that we all crush on other people.

Let’s look a little more.

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There is an etymology, if you like, to our crushes. The crush will have legs and arms in different parts of our lives. Whether those were easy bits or hard bits, it all comes from somewhere:

A Sheffield swimming pool in the 1970’s. Every bit as glamorous as it wasn’t. We’d fled London as my mum and dad’s marriage combusted and took a two-year layover in the city near my grandparents. The stink of chlorinated water, for me, will be forever stored alongside the confused gaze of the little women at Rotherham swimming baths. I call them that because at 7 years old, the girls in my swim class resolutely wore bikinis and swimming costumes strapped across their non-existent child chests, as if protecting against prying eyes of the future. I turned up in what I always wore: boy’s toweling red and white striped swimming trunks. It was a baffling time for everyone.

Add to that, boys got to do more exciting things than girls so naturally I gravitated towards boys. I had two bloke friends and we played in disused steel factories, prodded rigor morticed dead cats in abandoned buildings and broke into Duncan’s dad’s builder’s yard to ‘play’ with the different colored bags of cement in an era when kids were given free rein to disappear from morning till night and trash builder’s yards. 

It was a wild feral time and it all seemed natural to me. I tried to join the Brownies, to at least pay lip service to being a girl but it was vile. I endured one hateful session. I wasn’t conflicted about my gender or my sexuality. I just did not relate to the way that girls were expected to look, dress or behave at that time.

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Problem: what happens when you arrive at the doorstep of your teens; a dyed in the wool tomboy but you’re desperate for a new kind of attention from the opposite sex? 

What happens when you need to set out a new stall but you don’t know what it should look like?

Where was the road map for boy girls? 

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It’s a hard line to straddle, tomboy or not, to get noticed and taken seriously as a teenage girl. A few years ago, I watched Christina Aguilera bend over a chair whilst wearing a basque and suspenders on the television at 7pm in the evening, whilst singing and holding a microphone like a cock and thanked god I don’t have a daughter who might absorb the idea that this is an effective method of getting attention. Because, lets face it, it is.

Growing into womanhood is terrifying and simultaneously breathtakingly exciting and you need the right outfit for the occasion. Pre Internet, therefore pre generation porn, the lines were at least more clearly demarcated between Penthouse Pets/page 3 girls and the rest of the women of the world. But I still wasn’t sure where I fitted into this schema. The soul girls and casuals in my year at school looked like an army of miniature middle-aged Margaret Thatcher’s with their acrylic pussy bow blouses, box pleat skirts and fake leather high-heeled shoes. Compared to my scruffy comfort zone: orange mohican and flat pointy shoes from Kensington Market. There were no clues to be gleaned in the class of ‘84.

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Enter someone who helped me to understand who I was without saying a word. I wouldn’t have had the language to call this a girl crush because it wasn’t a thing but Patti Smith was nobody’s fool on the cover of the album Easter. Even with the shadow of her nipple showing beneath her sheer cotton vest.

Seeing her for the first time was an epiphany, because she looked a bit like me. She looked like a strange boy girl but she clearly hadn’t been ousted from society because she was on the cover of a record. Having been banned from the sports team for apparently heaping shame upon the school with my orange hair do, Patti made me think that ploughing my own furrow could be a good thing. That sticking to my own version of appealing wasn’t a terrible idea.

She also gave me a blueprint for the way I have presented myself almost ever since. Particularly as a woman. I learnt from that one image that revelation doesn’t have to be slutty. That slutty doesn’t have to be bad. That the raw earthiness of an unshaved armpit has a truth about it - and that the truth is inarguably sexy. 

Patti owned it before the expression had been thought of.

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Patti, or the den mother as I like to think of her, helped normalize the hinterland I and many other tomboys occupied between what we think of as ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’. This hinterland is less of an issue now, but we’re still talking about it. H&M made an advert this autumn which riffs on the lyrics of ‘Like a lady’ because what being ‘a lady’ consists of is still up for discussion. Thank f**k.

Madonna had a hand too. I had to be careful with Madge. The 80’s were a tribal time and I once got cut down by a bloke in the pub for admitting I liked dance music. This was not ok if you had a mohican but no one did sexy and fuck you like Madonna and I wanted that more than I wanted the approval of a bloke in the pub. I observed her closely. If there had been a GCSE in early Madonna, I would have aced it.

Chrissie Hynde was also folded into my imagined gang as she growled the words ‘Fuck off’ on the first Pretenders album, played to me by my helpful older brothers. Remember, I had been a child in an era when my fellow future breast owners and I were not permitted to use the big playground at junior school because the boys need space to play football.  Girls subsisted on a strip of land next to the toilets. That tells you something about your place in the world but Chrissie seemed like the kind of person who would be bored by rules like that.

These women were mothers and sisters to add to the exceptional one’s I had in real life. They were every bit as important spiritually and visually.  Extra special mention goes to Paula Yates who gave an army of women my age a reason to think that you could be sexy, fun, blond, flirtatious, committed, admired and desired without people also assuming you were thick as two short planks.

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In its simplest terms, a girl crush can help you traverse the world, even when you’re not 100% conscious of your need for direction. Beauty can come into it for sure. The curve of Freya Beha Erickson’s top lip is something to behold. But her physical veneer alone isn’t enough to interest me. It’s about admiration of spirit and whilst I don’t know Freya personally, I would stake money on her being a woman who asks questions, who wouldn’t settle for the status quo, i.e. someone I might relate to.

Best case scenario, my girl crushes helped unlock the almost impossible to achieve challenge handed out to every woman upon birth: how to balance pleasing others and be ‘the nice girl’ whilst ultimately pleasing yourself, and if possible, also making everyone else think they got a good deal. It’s a life’s work – if you can be bothered to attempt it – but company is essential. I needed these women to show me how to step into womanhood without compromising myself.

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Which brings me to men. What does it mean to be a man? And was I talking bollocks about boy crushes? Did I imagine the whole thing?

I think not. Because I think men intuited Simon’s natural disregard for hackneyed male behavior. His internal male-to-female balance wasn’t a problem for him and you can’t buy that. It’s innate and it’s attractive. People who are comfy in their skin are that little bit more bewitching. People who find it difficult to square this balance, those who feel constricted by rigid gender narratives – I say this without judgement. We are all a product of the era and background from which we hark - are the ones more likely to ask, as happened to a straight female friend recently, ‘are you gay? Because you are always checking other women out…’

As if that were a negative in today’s climate. But also failing to understand what a lovely thing it is to appreciate one’s own gender from a place of enchantment, with no agenda beyond reflecting that person’s fabulousness back at them. And secretly hoping we might absorb some of it if we stand close enough.

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These days I am au fait with dresses, skirts and nuclear shades of red lipstick because I am a grown up and I can do what I like, when I like, and not when someone tells me to. ‘You’re so good at being a girl’ a female friend said once as I layered color onto my toenails. I smiled inside at this. If only she knew. 

But the feminine is still almost always grounded in something frayed or boyish for me. If the outfit is smart, then the hair is un-brushed. Something has to be out of whack. I cannot go full tilt traditional woman. Perfection bores me. And no one expects me to. This is partly because of whom I am and partly because I learnt from the best. A mother who came from Yorkshire and a phalanx of women in the 1980’s who redefined what it meant to be feminine.

The evolution continues. I walked out of a Patti Smith gig a few years back and barked ‘I want to be like Patti when I grow up’. Because she’d just opened a portal into the future by showing me what 65 looks like and it didn’t look anything like I imagined.  She picked the audience up like a hurricane picks up a house; pitched us into breathless frenzied orbit and slammed us gently back down at the end with words and sounds. It was sorcery. I saw women in their 20’s scream at the stage; such was the power of the performance. As if they couldn’t quite compute that this, all those years on from my own revelation, is what a woman can look like. 

By the end of this year she’ll be showing the world what 70 is. Once a girl crush always a girl crush.